Nor ever will--the angry Gods have fled,
Closed are the temples, mute are all the shrines,
The fires are quenched, Dodona's growth is dead,
The Sibyl's leaves are scattered to the winds.

No mystic sentence will they bear again,
Which, sagely spelled, might ward a nation's doom;
But we have left us still some god-like men,
And some great voices pleading from the tomb.

If we would heed them, they might save us yet,
Call up some gleams of manhood in our breasts,
Truth, valor, justice, teach us to forget
In a grand cause our selfish interests.

But we have fallen on evil times indeed,
When public faith is but the common shame,
And private morals held an idiot's creed,
And old-world honesty an empty name.

And lust, and greed, and gain are all our arts!
The simple lessons which our father's taught
Are scorned and jeered at; in our sordid marts
We sell the faith for which they toiled and fought.

Each jostling each in the mad strife for gold,
The weaker trampled by the unrecking throng
Friends, honor, country lost, betrayed, or sold,
And lying blasphemies on every tongue.